Monday, 20 May 2013

Completed Ident Signing in c:

Yay, I finally have something to show you guys! c: There will be more very soon because my deadline is in 4 days, but until then, I thought I'd show you my completed ident and talk about some of my influences behind it ^_^

I'm going to begin by talking a little bit about my style influences for this project. I plan to talk more about my animation inspirations in the summer at some point, but for now I'll just show the 4 pieces that influenced me the most with this project.

My two biggest inspirations for the longest time have been Toniko Pantoja's 'Crayon Dragon'

and Qing Han's 'Night Light'

You can pretty easily see the similarities between the two and I really loved the paint brush/colouring idea shown in both of these. I intend to produce some other animations in my free time at some point making use of similar ideas.

The other two inspirations were: Chelsea Gordon-Ratslaff, someone who has also been a massive inspiration to me. Her 2D animations are very, very expressive. I really wanted the characters I was animating to 'come to life' in terms of subtle eye movements and facial expressions and I feel I have achieved this to a degree, but nowhere near as much as I was aiming for.
Either way, it was her Portal 2 animation that was another big inspiring factor in my ident.

I really loved how dynamic the lions movements and expressions were in this and how the two characters interacted with each other. I ended up changing my animation style, particularly with Saffie, a little to allow better expressions and eye movements as I felt my previous style was quite limiting.

I began by cleaning up, inbetweening and line-arting the animatic. Animating the human for this project was a particular challenge for me as before I came here, I only really practiced animating quadrupeds (and in MS Paint at that xD). I'm not really very pleased with the final animation of my human character as she seems a little static, hopefully fluidity of human animation is something I'll be able to practice and improve on in the coming months. I'm really pleased with my dragon animation though, it was really fun to put the subtle eye movements and expressions into her c:
I made sure I applied the basic principles of animation we had learned, into this animation, particularly stretch and squash and overlap c:

I then coloured the whole thing, making the paint on the end of the paintbrush green, so I could greenscreen chroma key it to include my experimental animation 'paint' when I imported it into Sony Vegas.

I worked on another green stage with white to create the 'Falmouth University Animation' part, green screening that and fitting it over the top. I then found some fitting royalty-free music to add to it and I had finished :D I'm actually quite pleased with the outcome of this animation, however I think the human animation really lets it down and is something I'll need to work on in the future c:

I played around with the timing a little bit on the final version also, as the timing of the paintbrush being thrown seemed a little out.